Home Newswire Canadian SVOD service shomi prepares video assets 20% faster and streamlines workflows...

Canadian SVOD service shomi prepares video assets 20% faster and streamlines workflows with Elemental and AWS

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shomi, the Canadian SVOD service launched in 2014 and jointly owned by Rogers Media and Shaw Media, is harnessing Elemental Technologies and Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies to help it to rapidly scale the service and accelerate growth. “We are preparing video assets for viewing nearly 20% faster than before and rapidly scaling our offerings and subscriber base thanks to Elemental and its deepening integration with AWS services,” explains Augusto Rosa, Senior Director, Head of Video & Network Infrastructure at shomi. “This is critical to meeting the growing demand in the Canadian streaming market.”

In an Elemental Cloud workflow, shomi uses Elemental to manage, process and package large batches of file-based video content for both OTT and VOD delivery. Adaptive bit rate assets are packaged with corresponding digital rights management (DRM) schemes and stored on Amazon S3 (cloud storage). shomi currently uses Amazon CloudFront (CDN technology) as an origin server directly out of S3 to realize the benefit of high S3 throughput to an Akamai CDN for delivery to customers on a full range of connected devices.

Additionally, file-based transcoding is used on-premises for on-going development testing and to output mp4 files. These adaptive bit rate outputs are also uploaded to the cloud for packaging and storage in Amazon S3.

Using the Elemental compression and packaging solutions integrated with AWS storage and origination services, shomi has also streamlined workflows. Citing a 10-fold increase in cloud-based resource use over the past 12 months, Rosa says: “We have enjoyed Elemental Cloud so much that we have moved all of our content to it – and we have already moved all our video origin to AWS. Going forward we plan to use more Elemental and AWS Cloud-enabled features.”

shomi distinguishes itself in the Canadian field by manually curating content collections rather than relying on algorithms to pre-select consumer viewing options. Subscribers access OTT content through the company’s website and apps including, most recently, the Xbox One. The service can also be accessed through VOD libraries from participating cable providers.

“shomi’s strong brand and unique, highly personalized SVOD offering have pushed us to the forefront of the OTT market. Now we want to go further,” Rosa declares.

According to Aslam Khader, Chief Product Officer at Elemental, “Our deepening integration with AWS Cloud will create a range of highly-scalable solutions to help our customers be more agile, cost-effective, and elastic in delivering viewer services via the cloud. We are excited to help shomi connect subscribers to the video they want on an increasingly large scale.”


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